


veprecose

by sinistra_blache



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Arthur is the best in the business but also the best at lying to himself, Canon Compliant, Dream Logic, Hanahaki Disease, M/M, Pining, Pre-Inception, Unrequited Love, but it's not what I would call explicit, honestly he's a disaster in a good suit, some amount of body horror I guess, there's blood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-02
Updated: 2020-09-02
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:34:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26253451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinistra_blache/pseuds/sinistra_blache
Summary: Arthur coughs and pulls another three flowers out of his mouth in a wet clump. He discards them onto the floor thoughtlessly.A trail of small white blooms following him through the hotel.
Relationships: Arthur/Eames (Inception)
Comments: 12
Kudos: 126





	veprecose

Arthur is hired to the team after Eames, and he assumes he comes with a recommendation. It’s only after the team's own chemist, an excitable woman named Kendra who laughs at her own jokes, brings Arthur over to Eames’ workstation that he finds out this isn’t true. 

“Eames,” Arthur greets. He glances at what Eames is working on; birth certificates, at least three of them that Arthur can see. Foiling, Arthur notes, is something he always catches Eames doing during the prep stage of extractions. Like always, it looks flawless. 

“Ah, Arthur,” Eames sits back from his work. “I should have known that you were the secret weapon that they were hoping to rope in for this somnambulant jaunt. There are few in the business that cause such excitement within the ranks.” 

It’s probably a bad thing that his sarcastic tone sounds familiar, seems like a place of common ground and safety, to Arthur. Still, nothing to be done about it now. It’s too late for that. 

“I wasn’t hired after you cussed me out, then.” 

Eames laughs. Chuckles. Looks away but Arthur can still catch the amused glint in his eyes. “No. No, that only happened once,” he answers, sticking to his usual lie about that time in Hong Kong. Arthur _knows_ that he’s had a few calls following Eames’ usual tirade about how, for the best in the business, Arthur is almost impossible to be around or put up with. Hong Kong was just the most obvious case. “And I had nothing to do with your arrival here, I assure you. I’ve been quite enjoying working at a leisurely pace without a whip to my back.” 

“Have you?” Arthur asks without thinking. He somehow manages to regret his question as soon as it’s asked and want the answer, Eames’ non-verbal response, in equal measure. He blinks and concentrates on not showing that regret on his face. 

Eames leans forward, fingers steepled and seeming for everything in the world like he’s the one with the conversational high-ground even though he’s seated, he is the one giving Arthur the information asked of him, he is the subject here. “I suppose we’ll find out soon enough, won’t we?”

#

Ever since the Cicero job, long ago, Arthur insists on being the one who tests their compounds weeks before the team goes down together. Sometimes, if he’s been blessed by the gods of timing and structure, he gets to test everything months before the first group application.

Kendra isn’t a bad chemist. Arthur’s met hundreds, maybe a thousand, that are far worse. In fact, her skill might be the reason why he’s so keen to try the compound as she mixes it; she talks at length about the different ratios she wants to try, and what it could mean for clarity and ease of extraction. How she’s found a way to chemically tap into the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex, and how it’s going to change the rules of the business. It’s all dangerous, of course, but when isn’t it? Arthur’s brain chemistry, at this point, is beyond help. 

He’s already filled out the paperwork to donate his brain for research purposes when he dies, if it’s at all still usable. There’s a high chance, after all, that he’ll either catch a bullet wrong or he’ll go one job too far, turning his brain to mush either way. 

He doesn’t know which one he’d prefer but, then again, Arthur isn’t in the habit of thinking about how he’ll die. He just hopes that it’ll happen before he’s useless. There’s no retirement plan for him, after all. 

As Arthur goes down using Kendra’s compound, his safety isn’t his priority. His purpose on the team is to make sure the job goes smoothly. His purpose is to eliminate as much risk as possible. His safety is the currency with which to gain the team’s safe passage through another’s psyche. The dangers of the job are considered, but for the benefit of others. 

As he tests, he dreams alone. It’s going to be worse, he knows, to be stuck in his own mind without anyone to act as a buffer, but it doesn’t matter. Needs must. 

#

Arthur’s sitting at a café table in an empty hotel and the coffee in his hand is too hot to drink. He holds it anyway, bringing the cup up to his face and breathing in deeply. A French blend, one that doesn’t exist anymore, and not his usual black without sugar. There’s cream. He can smell the sugar in the coffee vapor. This isn’t his coffee, but that isn’t the detail that matters. 

What matters is how crisp the smells are, how exact the details are. Down to the cup in his hand, he notes, looking at it. Mal and Dom’s set that they received as a wedding gift. Delicate blue peonies curling around the handle and body. Arthur smiles, allowing for a moment of sentiment, and sets the coffee down on the table. Mal always hated those cups.

He looks around. His own subconscious never shows up when he goes down alone. Arthur’s spoken to others about it and he’s in the minority, but it’s not unheard of. A result of extreme repression, it’s been suggested. Eames in overly-amused tones, laughing at any detail that intimates Arthur’s tight hold on his own psyche. He suspects that Eames is entirely right about that but he’ll never admit to it and there’s no concrete proof of Eames’ guess being the correct one, so Arthur’s not in the habit of bringing it up often. 

All that Arthur knows is that his subconscious doesn’t populate his dreams with the unknown public and that he never feels completely safe without another dreamer with him. He sometimes gets glimpses of people he knows, or used to know, but he doesn’t even truly get to see them. He doesn’t even bother trying to talk to the projections when they flit through, and they never bother with him. It’s always just Arthur, alone, in an empty hotel.

The hotel is never the same, not unless he concentrates. 

This one is a glass and concrete monster with an impossible atrium, stretching vertically past balconies and hanging lights. Arthur should be able to see the sky above him but the lobby is dimmed out, the atrium itself overgrown with vines, branches, leaves. Arthur peers up at it as he walks and, eventually, realizes that he’s walking on dead leaves instead of the usual hotel carpet. 

He can still smell the coffee on the table behind him. He even checks, looking over his shoulder to see the café table, the cup of coffee steaming still, looking serenely out of place in the dim lobby as though there is a spotlight shining down on the scene. 

Arthur’s breath catches with an inexplicable pinch of fear, the telltale sign of an approaching nightmare, but he forces a slow exhale. Pushes past the tightness in his throat.

He can work through nightmares. 

His priority, he tells himself, is to determine whether the nightmare is a result of his own roiling psyche or if it’s a side-effect of Kendra’s compound. One is acceptable and unavoidable. The other requires more trials to smooth out. 

He clears his throat with a quiet cough, but it’s still tight. The panic in his chest holds on like a sticky grip, making everything closer and harder than it should be. 

He coughs again, a little forcefully, unwilling to give in to the fear so easily, and Arthur feels something come up — it sits on his tongue, free from any bile or taste, and feels like a piece of paper. Typical nightmare stuff, he thinks. Deadpan even through the fluttering of panic in his chest. He opens his mouth and pulls out—

A flower. 

A small white flower. 

Arthur doesn’t recognize it. Out in the air, free of his mouth, it’s completely dry and pure. Dream logic that he hardly bothers to acknowledge. 

“That’s a new one,” he says to no-one. Speaks to himself, and only himself. The panic is gone as quickly as it set in, replaced with curiosity and mild concern, and Arthur pockets the flower to look at later should he need to. 

#

The coughing and, with it, the flowers, doesn’t let up. Arthur stops keeping them when they start to fall out of his pocket. 

Unlike picked flowers topside, the ones plucked from his throat never wither even a little. They stay perfect and healthy in his pocket even when he crumples them, stuffs them in, takes a handful of them, and crushes them in his fist. He opens his hand to find them bright and cheerful against his skin. The picture of perfection. 

He coughs and pulls another three out of his mouth in a clump. He discards them onto the floor thoughtlessly. A trail of small white flowers following him through the hotel. 

#

It’s the compound, Arthur decides, as he opens a door to find himself in a small field looking at a greenhouse instead of an immaculately kept hotel room. The air around him is thick with green and wet smells. Mud, he thinks with only a little hint of disdain. Rain and mud and kinds of plants he’s seen before, though he’s never known their names. . 

It smells like England, he thinks vaguely, and coughs. Spits a flower to the floor. He’s about to keep walking, to investigate the greenhouse in front of him, but the catch in his throat doesn’t stop with the flower this time. 

It feels thicker, and sharper, and heavier. 

This time, he’s choking after the cough. There’s more to it than flowers. Wildly, Arthur imagines a ball of small white flowers stuck in his throat, blocking air to his lungs, and he sticks two fingers into his mouth to try to pull out what he can reach. 

It’s not pretty, but no-one else is around. Arthur feels no shame as he hacks and rummages around in his own mouth until he gets something. It’s not flowers, he realizes as small thorns cut into his fingers, as he tastes blood. It doesn’t matter what it is, he panics distantly, because he still can’t breathe and he doesn’t want to die in this dream without seeing more of what there is to offer.

He pulls on the thorned plant and, unsurprisingly, it _hurts_. His throat feels like it’s being cut to shreds, sliced into ribbons, but Arthur keeps going. It’s like pulling a thread, like he’s swallowed a spool of razor wire, and he just has to pull it up inch by inch. 

After a few tugs, he can breathe again, but there’s still more to take out. There’s more to uproot from deeper inside of him.

He ends up on his knees, retching and gasping, blood on his hands and lips, surrounded by blackberry brambles. There’s no fruit ripening, only small white flowers within the thorns. Arthur pulls the last of it out of him and gasps in gulps of air, studying the bloody leaves and barbs, wondering what the hell he’s going to do about this. Wondering why he only recognizes the flower once it’s surrounded by thorns.

“Hell of a side-effect,” he rasps, his voice _ruined_ but still working. He checks his watch and notes that he has another twenty minutes down here with the briars and flowers, with the greenhouse looming ahead of him in the field that should be a bedroom, with the air that smells like rain.

He wastes five of those minutes catching his breath and he can’t help but feel as though Eames would be laughing at him by now if he were here. 

#

He makes his way through the greenhouse, but so do the blackberries. Arthur never actually sees them moving but he can _sense_ it. There’s no breeze in the greenhouse-within-a-room, but the brambles still sway like there is. The small white flowers shine brilliantly in the overgrown gloom. He finds himself frowning at them more than is strictly healthy. 

He’s talking to himself, too, despite the damage to his voice. An attempt at self-soothing, he intones internally, but he allows it. Like his retching, like the blood on his mouth and hands, there’s no-one to see Arthur in his moment of vulnerability. It’s only him down here and he’s the only one who knows what he’s like. There’s no sense in shame. Arthur doesn’t feel shame. Disappointment in himself, certainly. A heaped helping of self-loathing, always a constant drumbeat in the back of his mind, absolutely. But he feels no shame in the moment. 

Not even when he talks to himself. “This is deranged,” he comments, voice scratchy and abused, peering around corners before taking them. “Not to mention the most boring greenhouse imaginable.”

He’s not being unnecessarily unkind to himself; the greenhouse is full of notably common plants. They’re not the usual kinds of plants you might find in a large public greenhouse, which is how the building presents itself. To be _very specific_ , Arthur finds himself surrounded by common British plants.

Wildflowers are everywhere, awarded glamor spots within the greenhouse walls that would be otherwise reserved for huge, bright, tropical blooms. In their place, daisies and bluebells and snowdrops. Clusters of gorse threaten Arthur from the upper levels. Lavender creates pockets of perfumed air as Arthur passes, as the brambles follow him through the walkways. 

The fact that they’re all British plants, all English plants, is not lost on Arthur. “I’m going to ignore that,” he tells the walls of ivy and hawthorn. His leg gets caught on a nearby blackberry thorn, but he tugs until he’s free again. “I get it, but I’m going to ignore it.” 

He’s lying to the hawthorn and ivy, of course, because he can’t help but imagine Eames’ comments about how lacking in imagination even Arthur’s nightmares are. How businesslike they are. A calm conversation, spitting out blackberry blooms and blood. He imagines Eames’ assessments, fails entirely in his task of ignoring the point this greenhouse is making, and attempts to concentrate on avoiding the tug of thorns as they catch at his clothes.

Because they keep catching. 

It’s annoying at first. The brambles always finding some purchase on him, the thorns somehow digging into the fabric of his suit instead of sliding off the tight weave of thread. Within minutes Arthur’s clothes are ruined. They’re not real but he still mourns the loss of the neat lining of his jacket when the silk loses the battle against the shredding thorns. It doesn’t take long for Arthur to realize that it’s easier to just lose the jacket entirely than keep fighting against the catches on frayed edges. 

He twists out of the jacket, allows it to be practically eaten by the tangle, and finally takes a stuttered breath for long enough to take in the scene around him. 

The wildflowers, the ivy, the hawthorn, are gone. More accurately, Arthur thinks they might still be nearby — but hidden behind the brambles. The blackberry flowers are everywhere now, the thorns so close to him and swaying in that non-existent breeze that it all seems to be breathing. 

“Shit,” he says quietly. With feeling. He’s had his fair share of nightmares, and he’s died so many times in-dream that he’s lost count, but he’s never died at the hands of a plant before. He’s never pulled his imminent death from his own throat before.

Nightmare logic is like dream logic, but it feels sick. They don’t always seem scary on the surface, but Arthur has always recognized the illness in nightmares. Something disgusting that the body, his mind, doesn’t want around. The fear is a process that fights the nightmare. Nothing frightening has to be happening for the fear to take him, which is why he needs a way through it all.

It’s like lucid dreaming. When dreaming, there are checks to make sure the dreamer is aware of it and can start to control what’s happening. Totems are one way to do it, but there are other methods. Manipulating light is impossible in-dream, so some people flip light-switches to do their checks. Some people can’t read words when they’re under. Arthur finds that, after all these years, the only time when he finds himself questioning reality is when something remarkable happens topside. As though there’s nothing that could happen when he’s awake that could surprise him. The height of arrogance. 

With nightmares, there are similar checks. There are ways to control the fear. He knows that there are different approaches, as with dreams, but Arthur has always talked through his nightmares to wrestle the control back into his hands. The severity of the nightmare dictates how much he talks, how much correspondence he has with himself in the end. If he talks through what’s happening, then Arthur finds it easier to find where logic takes sick lurches, and it gets easier to roll with the psychological punches. 

Surrounded by the bloody thorns, realizing that he’s going to be killed by them, his logic turns sick. He never, never sees the movement but, as soon as he knows how it’s all going to end for him, the thorns are _there_ and pulling at his skin as they had torn through his jacket lining.

Arthur hisses against the cuts. Deeper and crueller than they would be if they were normal plants, of course. The thorns get caught in his flesh, stuck in his arms, and he struggles to pull them out before he gets further tangled. 

The briars are like quicksand. Arthur struggles and the plants gain more purchase. It makes sense, in the way that dreams make sense, and twisted up to make him feel helpless and trapped. Sick. He opens his mouth to say something, to insult the growth or to talk himself through what’s happening. So say _anything_ , but then—

—then footsteps click through the greenhouse. 

Arthur stops struggling. Instinct: Stay still and quiet and assess the situation before he’s seen. There’s no-one down with him. He knows that. That fact sits heavy in his chest. He’s alone, as always, in an empty hotel. 

The only people who could walk in on him right now are projections, but they never speak to him. He never speaks to them. 

Despite all that, the footsteps make their way closer and closer. Thorns, never moving but always reaching him, test at the skin on Arthur’s neck. They dig into the open wounds on his arms. He doesn’t move, doesn’t make a sound. Not until he sees who is coming closer. 

In retrospect, Arthur should have known. The wildflowers and the brambles. The smell of mud in an old greenhouse. The overgrown vines and creeping ivy blocking out the sun in the atrium. The heavy, masculine edge to the dangerous click of shoes against tile. Arthur should have predicted, all along, that it was going to be Eames. 

“But you’re so good at ignoring all that,” the projection says, the way Eames twists praise into an insult like a nightmare twisting logic. He looks at Arthur. Takes in the sights. “Found ourselves in a bit of a bind, have we?”

“Very funny,” Arthur rasps, again dismissing his shame, refusing to feel like a fool for engaging with one of his own projections. If it was anyone else then it might have been easier to ignore but… Well. Eames always plays by different rules, here and topside. “A little help would be appreciated.” 

Eames’ lips twitch into a smirk. “I don’t think so, no.” 

The thorns pull at Arthur, their grip tightening around his torso like a fist. He stares at the projection of Eames, standing free and unhindered with his hands in his pockets. “What?”

“Why would I help you? If you can give me a good reason, Arthur, a really phenomenal reason, then I will,” he says, stepping closer. While he speaks, Arthur is distracted, and the brambles make their way around his legs. He feels like he’s being held tighter and tighter and, when he looks down, sees spirals of thorns and small, white flowers across his body. “Can you think of a particularly good reason for me to step in and end this?”

“I’m about to be torn apart by a shrubbery,” Arthur’s voice pulls at the meat of his throat. It hurts to talk. It hurts even more when he speaks angrily, it turns out, but Eames doesn’t look concerned. Instead, his smirk blossoms into a satisfied smile, head tilted and eyes unblinking. 

Arthur’s seen that look on Eames’ face before. Once, in a gallery in Milan, looking at a Caravaggio, while they were meant to be shadowing a mark. Eames leaned close to the piece, barely blinking. Smiling, but not because he wanted anyone to be charmed. Smiling just because he was happy. Arthur doesn’t think he was supposed to see that moment, and it felt private. Forbidden. 

Even more forbidden was the thought that Arthur had at the time, that he wanted Eames to look at him like that. Now he had it. Eames staring at him without blinking, a smile on his face that had nothing to do with charm, and studying Arthur as though he were a Caravaggio. 

It’s not what he expected. Arthur doesn’t _hate_ it, but… 

“I would have you recite sonnets with your voice like that,” the projection says. Arthur closes his eyes and nods, though it has nothing to do with agreement. Nothing to do with affirmation. Of course the projection speaks to him like that; delighting in the inherent allure of someone else’s pain. This is all Arthur, just with Eames’ face slapped on top.

Just his own desires coming out of Eames’ mouth and, cruelly, more damaging, more painful than every puncture and prick that finds its way into the skin on Arthur’s stomach and chest. 

The nightmare continues, his cough returning the longer he looks at Eames and the closer the projection gets to Arthur. It persists. “If I asked,” he says, and Arthur already knows that his answer is a breathless _yes_. “You would do it, wouldn’t you? Choking on your repression and bound by your blandness, and you would still read me poetry if I asked for it.” 

Arthur doesn’t answer but he couldn’t even if he wanted to. He can’t move his head any longer — he can’t look down at his body to assess his wounds or to see what state his clothes are in — but he can feel three tiers of thorns curling and pressing into his neck. Slowly but surely, the pain sharp and bright, Arthur is pierced. 

Eames is close now. If Arthur could move, he would be able to lean in and press their lips together. He could _take a breath_ and pull Eames into a kiss. But he can’t move, and Eames doesn’t close the distance between them. 

Arthur’s breath is being squeezed out of him, from the constricting brambles around his chest, from the thorns digging into his throat, from the small white flowers building up inside his lungs again, from Eames being so close to him and giving him so little. He has seconds between blood loss, shock, and strangulation. His vision is already tunneling. 

Weird way to die, he notes. Too weird. 

Eames’ sucks his teeth. Disappointment? Arthur doesn’t know and can’t ask. “You understand that I’ll never ask, don’t you?” he asks. Whispers into the space between them. Of course Arthur can’t respond. He doesn’t have to. “I’ll never want this, Arthur. Not in the way you want it.” 

Arthur can nod, but it makes his throat tear even further. He nods. He knows. He’s always known.

Eames has moments of boredom, and he must see Arthur as a way to relieve that boredom. Bespoke. Couture. Cut from silk suiting fabric just to rid Eames of his frustrations in the middle of a job, always willing no matter how often they fight, no matter what Eames says to him or the names he calls him. Arthur knows that he’s a port of convenience to Eames, and that no matter how much he wants to be more that much will always be impossible.

Arthur has always known. It has never stopped him.

He drowns without water. Flowers catch in his throat and can’t be coughed out. The brambles work in tandem; pulling tighter as the struggle turns into instinct and as Arthur becomes frantic right before he dies. 

He can’t be sure, but he thinks he feels Eames’ hand in his hair as he dies. He can’t be sure. 

#

He comes up gasping. That’s not surprising. Still, Arthur has to catch his breath for longer than usual, and he feels like he’s blinking too rapidly. 

“So? What’s the verdict?” Kendra pulls up a chair, but Arthur shakes his head and she doesn’t bother to actually sit down. She frowns at him. “What’s wrong with it?”

“I’ll need another five minutes, maybe ten, but I’d put money on it leaning too hard on the hallucinatory chemicals and not enough on the sedative,” he says, pleasantly surprised to find his voice entirely intact. He smooths his hands over the fabric of his suit’s jacket, then opens it to inspect the lining. 

He knows everything’s fine, and that it could be no other way, but it still feels good to _know_. 

He looks up at Kendra. “Can you come up with a different mix? We’ll have to test everything you make,” he says. On the other side of the room, Eames gets up from his desk, from his work on the birth certs, and starts to make his way over. Arthur clears his throat compulsively.

“I thought it wasn’t right?” Kendra checks. Arthur shakes his head again. 

“It’s perfectly vivid,” he tells her, because it was. Everything she promised about the cocktail was delivered, and more. “I’d even suggest you keep this mix for different purposes. Therapists would benefit and would buy from you at a high price. The military could use it for gaining intel—” 

“Bloody hell, Arthur. Selling to the military, are we?” Eames interrupts, planting himself on the chair Kendra pulled over. “What did you find down there? Couldn’t have been that bad if it was just you wandering around on your lonesome.” 

Arthur weighs his words, thinking about them carefully before speaking. “It’s nightmares,” he admits as Kendra walks away. “It’s nightmares all the way down.” 

Telling Eames the truth isn’t a problem. He knows how to keep a secret, after all. The problem is getting the truth from Eames. That’s always been the problem with Eames. Telling Eames the truth doesn’t bother Arthur at all and he realizes just how true it all is when he says it. 

Mal’s old coffee at an empty café table. The plants eating the sunlight from the atrium. The wrongness of the leaves inside the hobby. The smell of mud, and rain. The greenhouse-inside-a-room. Eames’ boots against the tile, echoing around him. Nightmares, all the way down.

Eames’ eyebrows go up. “And you’re alright, are you?” he checks, the question simple and complicated in equal measure. 

Arthur shrugs. He will be, he supposes, but he doesn’t actually answer.

“I see,” Eames exhales as he sits back and considers Arthur. He must know how strange it is to experience lucid nightmares, as men without natural dreams. “You’re going back down there, of course.” 

“Of course,” Arthur agrees. 

Eames nods thoughtfully. “You’ll fight me on it because you’re a thick-headed twat at the best of times,” he says, enunciating clearly, “but I’ll be staying here as you go down again. I’ll keep an eye. Do you need anything for when you come back?”

Arthur takes an unimpeded breath, marveling at the ease after so long fighting his lungs. He shakes his head a little. “I’m not going to fight you on it.” 

“It must have been really bad,” Eames murmurs. In a shock twist, he isn’t teasing Arthur. He’s not mocking him. Usually his words are benign while his inflections become barbs, flicking out to wound quickly before moving on. Arthur’s never heard it the other way around. He’s sure he’s never heard it the other way around. 

It brings out more honesty from Arthur. “It was really bad.” 

“Righto,” is all Eames says, almost perky, as though he need not say anything else. He takes out a battered pack of cigarettes from his trouser pocket and places them, along with an ancient brass lighter, on top of the table near Arthur. He doesn’t say anything else, but he settles into the chair by the lounger. 

He doesn’t move while Arthur sets himself up for another five minutes. He just watches Arthur as he works. Before the dream takes him down, Arthur puts his hand into his pocket. He finds his die too late to check this reality.

He’s already asleep. 

# 

Arthur sits at a café table in an empty hotel and the coffee in his hand is too hot to drink. There are leaves dying underfoot, and the air smells like rain.

**Author's Note:**

> I just wanted to be able to do hanahaki stuff without taking them out of the canon and this is what happened.


End file.
